Many applications select a single entry or subsets of entries from long entry lists. For example, mobile cellular devices may select a name or phone number from an address book, navigation devices may select a destination from a list of streets or cities, and MP3 players may pick a song out of a list of songs stored on the device. Current solution strategies for picking entries from a long entry list, such as “line selection” or “alphabetic selection by spelling,” depend on relatively sophisticated user interfaces. For example, some strategies may use advanced speech synthesis engines using dynamic generation of grapheme to phoneme conversion to auditorily present the long entry list and to provide auditory feedback to the user. Such strategies may also use speech recognition engines to recognize a user's spoken entry selection. Additionally or alternatively, the strategies may use a sophisticated visual display for visual feedback. The visual display may display more than one line of text so that each entry is displayed on a separate line. This arrangement allows the user to select an entry using a voice command by referring to the line associated with the entry.
Nonetheless, as mentioned above, these interfaces are relatively sophisticated and may complicate and/or add cost to a device using them. Furthermore, many solution strategies for picking entries from a long entry list, such as “line selection” or “alphabetic selection by spelling,” are typically not suitable for a device which has no dynamically generated auditory feedback, limited visual feedback (e.g. displays only one line of text with 12 characters), and no or minimal speech recognition capabilities (e.g., voice recognition of only a few selected words and/or affirmative and negative commands).